One year on: the BOM website that cost $96.5 million, not $4 million

On Wednesday 22 October 2025, the Bureau of Meteorology switched on its new website. Four days later, on Sunday afternoon, severe thunderstorms and a tornado tore across south-east Queensland and Victoria, leaving more than 60,000 Queensland homes without power. It was exactly when millions of people needed the radar most.

What they got was a radar that was hard to read, place names they couldn't make out, and rainfall data that farmers couldn't find. The new radar's colour scale stopped at orange, so the black that Australians had learned to read as hail was gone. "The new BOM radar view has essentially clipped the top end of the radar scale at orange, so we can't see any detail in the biggest storms," 7NEWS meteorologist Tony Auden said. Nationals leader David Littleproud pointed out you could no longer search by GPS coordinates, only by town or postcode, which is useless if your property sits between towns.

Nine days after launch, the bureau switched the radar map back to the old style.

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The $4 million website that wasn't

At first, the public was told the redesign cost about $4.1 million. A month after launch, the bureau told the ABC the real figure was approximately $96.5 million.

A $31 million contract that became $78 million

Most of the money went to one company. The bureau's contract with Accenture Australia started at $31 million and grew to $78 million through nine extensions.

At Senate Estimates in late 2025, Greens senator Barbara Pocock called it a "nightmare Harvard case study in contract failure and management of contracts", and said of Accenture: "This is a firm that is famous for 'land and expand'." The bureau's chief information and technology officer, Nichole Brinsmead, pushed back: "I don't think these contracts were as badly managed as you make out." Environment Minister Murray Watt said it "may well be a contract that demonstrates the need for greater oversight of consultants".

The website is part of a much bigger overhaul known as the ROBUST program, set up after a significant cyber intrusion in 2015 and major technology outages in 2016. ROBUST was funded in three tranches in the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2020-21 Budgets ($91.5 million, $346.9 million and $350 million), a total of $788 million. According to the bureau's chief executive, it closed in July 2024 having cost $866 million, with the extra $78 million coming from the bureau's own budget, and a follow-up "transition program" to finish the remaining work cost another $47 million. The new website "accounted for approximately $96 million" of ROBUST.

Minchin told Senate Estimates the response to the launch "shows that we didn't get it right for some sectors of the community".

Then the same company won more work

In March 2026, the Australian Climate Service (a partnership of federal agencies that includes the bureau) awarded Accenture a further $15.68 million contract to build a "Climate Risk Hub", with options that could run to 2033. Climate scientists, speaking anonymously to the ABC, questioned whether it would deliver value for money, especially if it came at the expense of research at the bureau and CSIRO.

Still waiting for answers

Watt asked the bureau's new chief executive, Stuart Minchin, to report back on what went wrong. In August 2026 the bureau announced an independent review led by Phillip Glyde, a former chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. It is due to report by 31 March 2027, almost eighteen months after the launch, and its terms of reference don't specifically name the website.

Why it matters

The BOM website isn't a vanity project. Farmers plan harvests around it, emergency services use it in floods and fires, and families check it before they drive. When it fails during a storm, that isn't a design problem. It's a safety problem.

And when a public agency tells taxpayers a project cost $4 million, then admits it cost $96.5 million, people are entitled to ask what else they haven't been told.

For scale: the BOM website cost almost half as much as a whole year of the federal government's Disaster Ready Fund. In 2025–26 the fund put $200 million into 96 projects across Australia to prepare for bushfires, floods and cyclones, according to the National Emergency Management Agency. One of them is a cyclone shelter for up to 800 people on Palm Island, with $14.62 million in Commonwealth funding.

Top photo: the Bureau of Meteorology's Berrimah weather radar, Darwin (file photo, 2007). Photo: Bidgee, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.